E3: Dishonored hands-on preview and Watch Dogs

By Jonathan Riggall

Jun 7, 2012

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At E3, Rutger has been lucky enough to play Dishonored, the upcoming first-person game from Bethesda that was first shown last summer at Gamescom. It’s one of the most exciting new games around, and a breath of fresh air in an E3 that is full of sequels. Read on for our hands-on impressions of this innovative game and find out why we’re looking forward to it so much.

We’ve also got a video of Ubisoft’s just-announced Watch Dogs, another new title that looks great.

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Dishonored

Out in October on PC and consoles, in Dishonored you play Corvo, the ex-bodyguard of the Empress in the city of Dunwall. Wrongly accused of her murder, you are forced into hiding and become an assassin driven to expose your accusers. Corvo has some help with this as he’s been given supernatural powers by a mystery force called ‘The Outsider’.

Dunwall is a mixture of British Victorian and steampunk styles, so you have classic architecture with Jules Verne-like retro-futuristic machinery. The design in the game is fantastic, and really give Dishonored an interesting atmosphere – Dunwall is ruled cruelly, with the poor segregated and policed by violent steampunk man-machines.

Creative gameplay

Playing Dishonored takes some getting used to. Corvo’s powers complicate the controls, but are great fun once you get used to them so are worth the trouble! You can stop time, possess people or animals, use telekinesis and teleport short distances. Add traditional weapons to this, and you have a fantastic arsenal at your command that you can use really creatively.

Like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you are encouraged to play the way you want. You can be as stealthy as you want to be, and as violent. It may even be possible to beat Dishonored without killing anyone, if you can use your powers intelligently enough. With all the different ways you can play Dishonored and the multiple endings, it promises to be a game you’ll be able to play through more than once. We were really looking forward to seeing this, and so far it hasn’t disappointed us. Roll on October!

Watch Dogs

Ubisoft surprised everyone when it showed Watch Dogs at its conference. A completely new title, it’s an open world thriller set in Chicago. The first thing that springs to mind is GTA IV, as it’s a third-person game set in a big city, but watching the gameplay video, you quickly see where Watchdogs is different. The atmosphere is much darker, and your character is some kind of agent with a device that lets him hack communication and electronic systems. He can monitor mobile phones, search personal data, and hack the city’s Central Operating System to control everything from stop lights to bridges.